Bodies that no Longer Walk as before Lives that Keep Moving: Existential Mobility Embodied Aging and Spaces of Presence

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Gerontological research often treats mobility as functional capacity: walking speed, distance traveled, access to transport, or independence in daily living. These measures are indispensable, but they do not fully capture what mobility means for older adults whose bodies no longer walk as before. This article develops existential mobility to understand how older persons preserve presence, identity, and belonging through small movements, relational supports, and meaningful places. Research Design and Methods: The article draws on accumulated ethnography in urban and rural Veracruz, Mexico, mainly Xalapa, its periphery, and Úrsulo Galván. The material includes 54 urban and seven rural interviews with mostly working-class women and men aged 65–85, prolonged conversations, observation, and go-along fieldwork conducted in 2024–2025 and continuing through ongoing observation. Results: Reduced walking does not necessarily mean social disappearance. Older adults sustain mobility through looking, remembering routes, deciding from home, supervising work, negotiating assistance, choosing safe times of day, using phones, relying on children or neighbors, and maintaining attachments to markets, fields, yards, streets, and health services. Existential mobility has embodied, relational, spatial, temporal, and moral dimensions. Discussion and Implications: Existential mobility does not romanticize frailty. It makes visible both the agency of aging bodies and the unequal conditions that contract or expand their worlds. Practice and policy should assess meaningful destinations, fear of falling, rest, shade, accompaniment, decision making authority, and the risk that care becomes confinement.